Night and Sleep by Evelyn De Morgan, 1878
One of my favorite literary bloggers, Tom from Wuthering Expectations, did a post on Modern European Poetry with a focus on the Greek poetry contained within this wonderful volume. If you haven’t had a chance to read Tom’s posts then please do yourself a favor and peruse his blog. His analysis of literature is full of what the Roman poet Catullus would call facetiae (wit) and lepida (charms).
As I was reading through this collection of modern poetry, I was happy to find poems by Ingeborg Bachmann whose name I have seen many times on bloggers’ personal canons. A few poems by the Italian author Umberto Saba also captivated me. I thought I would share one particularly short yet moving piece (Catullus would definitely approve!)
One Night
If only sleep would come, as it has come
on other nights: already slipping through
my thoughts.
Instead now,
like an old washerwoman wringing clothes,
anguish wrings another pain from my heart.
I would cry out but cannot. As for torment—
suffered once—I suffer on in silence.
And that which I have lost, only I know
Translated by Felix Stefanile
thebookbindersdaughter.com 